Introducing Keith Casey, Austin by way of PHP

Hi, I’m Keith Casey and I’m the newest Developer Evangelist at Twilio. The first 90% of my job is to get good tools into the hands of good developers so they can build great things.

I’ve been a PHPer for years so I understand what that community needs from a variety of angles. I know that every project, framework, and company has their own priorities, goals, and perspective on things. My goal is to make sure that our planning, features, and tools takes all of those things into consideration.

I’m based in the “The Live Music Capital of the World” known as Austin, TX. While we’re known for the chaos that is SXSW, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Just below the surface, we have startups like Gowalla, Chaotic Moon, and Infochimps pushing the bounds of mobile and Big Data while the technology groups clamor for the latest and greatest concepts to apply. The sheer amount of creativity is fantastic and I hope to pull new ideas in and spread others back out.

Finally, I have experience working for a traditional SMS aggregator. If you’ve explored that space at all, you’re familiar with the dark arts of connectivity, negotiating carrier approval, and generally learning more about telecom than any web developer would ever desire. A project that would take weeks to build could take months for approval. No matter how hard we worked, it was still outside our control.

Discovering Twilio

Twilio rocked my world. I sat down with the Quick Start and within 10 minutes I could send messages. Within 30 minutes, I could make calls. Within a couple hours, I could record voicemails and send notifications. In a single evening, I built a module for web2project that would log a call, record a voicemail, send an SMS to the project manager, and transcribe the call to make it searchable for everyone.

Normally this sort of thing would have taken weeks but instead I was done in a couple hours with only 100 lines of code. Based on everything I experienced before, it didn’t seem right, which told me Twilio was on to something special.

The Other 90%

Finally, the other 90% of the job is to discover and collect features, problems, projects, and ideas hidden in the community that would make the Twilio platform better. To get there from here, I’m attending user group meetings, fielding questions, digging out answers, and generally helping build the components to make all of our lives easier.

Do you already have ideas or want to show off something cool? Feel free to drop me a note at keith@twilio.com or catch me on Twitter at @CaseySoftware.